My Fucking White Privilege

Because of my fucking white privilege, I can write about me.

If I write about me, I can be accused of being racist. Because what's going on in the US in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd isn't about me. So writing about me is an indulgence in my fucking white privilege.

Acknowledging my fucking white privilege is racist. Wishing there were no such thing as white privilege is racist. Empathizing with people of color, joining in the chorus of "Black Lives Matter," or saying his name, these are all acts of a racist.

I can't make my racism or my fucking white privilege go away. They were both endowed on me by the society in which I grew up. I was raised in a town that had virtually no people of color. There may have been one black kid in my high school, but I didn't know him/her.

I remember being at the beach once with my family and trying to catch tiny fish and put them in a bucket. I couldn't have been more than 7 or 8 years old. This kid came over to help me, and together we devised a system of holding a beach towel under the water, waiting for a school of fish to swim over, and lifting together from the corners. We caught hundreds, maybe thousands, of fish that way, and it was fun. He was black, probably the first and only black kid I ever played with. I remember feeling conscious, in a self-congratulatory way, that I was playing with a black kid.

I grew up in the 1960s and came of age in the 1970s. I saw violent race riots on TV. I knew that these were the result of social and economic inequality, and I hoped they would bring change to the nation. But I was also glad they were far away from my monochrome hometown.

My father worked as a TV repairman in a town that had a diverse population which, over the years I was growing up, became less and less diverse as whites exercised their fucking white privilege and fled to whiter locales. I used to go to work with my dad and accompany him on service calls to the homes of customers. I remember feeling uncomfortable when we were in the home of a black family. Their houses seemed more rundown to me, less clean, a little smelly.

I was conflicted by these feelings of unease. My parents taught me well that we are all equal. I learned never to treat people differently based on skin color.

But somewhere along the way I learned the wrong lesson. I conflated being equal with being the same. And I had no real experience to help me correct my misconception. So when I got my first job out of college, teaching high school music in a racially diverse community, I attempted to treat all my students the same. I failed to recognize the diverse historical and cultural backgrounds of my students. My only frame of reference was my own: white male of European descent. I knew nothing about the black experience. I didn't know how to relate to musical interests that were different from my own. I didn't know how to support my black students in their love of the music of their heritage. And I didn't realize that the failure was mine. I thought being equal meant being the same.

I'd like to think my understanding has evolved, but that doesn't mean I have any idea what it means to grow up and live in a country where the other people have fucking privilege and I don't.

And I'm ashamed, because I'm glad I'm not one of the ones without the fucking privilege.

I wish there were no fucking privilege. Or equal privilege. But since there is fucking privilege, and there always was, I'm glad I was one of the ones who had it, rather than one of the ones who didn't.

There's nothing I can do about it. I am a product of the society where I grew up with fucking white privilege.

And now here we are in 2020, in the midst of a global pandemic, with cities in the US exploding in violence. I believe from what I've read that most of the looting and destruction have been brought on not by peaceful protest that turned violent, but by outside agitators who have taken advantage of the opportunity to wreak havoc and blame it on others. But regardless of why there has been violence, that's what the murder of George Floyd has ultimately led to. Fifty-some years after the race riots I watched on TV, in Newark, in Watts, in Detroit. Fifty-two years after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Twelve years after the election of an African-American President. Wasn't racial injustice supposed to be a thing of the past? Why hasn't the US figured out how to move past it?

I think the reason this is still happening in 2020 is because of my fucking white privilege. And yours. It's just too easy to be racist. It's too comfortable to enjoy the fucking privilege that comes with being white in the United States of America. 

I have read numerous accounts of what it is like to grow up and live in the US without that fucking privilege. Adults being pulled over by police for doing nothing wrong but driving while black. Teens being shot dead for doing nothing wrong but jogging through a neighborhood where they don't live. Mothers filled with anxiety as their sons grow up into men who might be killed without justification. 

But with my fucking privilege, I can't ever know what that feels like.

I believe the violence we are seeing across the US right now is not being perpetrated by thugs as a form of protest against this injustice. I believe it's mostly white people acting on their fucking privilege.

But if there were a violent uprising of blacks in America, I wouldn't sit here six hundred miles from the US border and exercise my fucking white privilege by judging or decrying. The only judgment I can make is against the society that set up millions of its members to be less privileged than I am.

Certain conditions continue to exist in our society, which must be condemned as vigorously as we condemn riots. But in the final analysis, a riot is the language of the unheard. And what is it that America has failed to hear? It has failed to hear that the plight of the Negro poor has worsened over the last few years. It has failed to hear that the promises of freedom and justice have not been met. And it has failed to hear that large segments of white society are more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice, equality and humanity. And so in a real sense our nation’s summers of riots are caused by our nation’s winters of delay. And as long as America postpones justice, we stand in the position of having these recurrences of violence and riots over and over again. Social justice and progress are the absolute guarantors of riot prevention.

—Martin Luther King, Jr., Stanford University, 1967